Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality

The 14th Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for SoftwareQuality(REFSQ 2008)willbe held inthe beautiful city ofMontpellier, France, June 16-17, 2008. The main topic was ?tness of requirements engineering. Our economic p- ductivityandwell-beinginevery-daylifestronglyhingesoninformationtechn- ogy, and thus software quality. In most systems, quality is determined through the development process. With the spread of service-oriented and autonomic systems, software quality is continuously negotiated and adapted at run-time. Requirements Engineering sets the stage for quality, both at development- and run-time. In spite of the constant emergence of new technologies and devel- mentparadigms,basicissuessuchase?ectivecommunicationbetweenstakeho- ersorcorrectness,consistencyandcompletenessoflargerequirementsdocuments are the dominant issues in industry. Seventeenpaperswrittenbyauthorsfrom13di?erentcountriesaddressthese topics, with particular focus on elicitation, innovative systems and empirical studies, as well as industrial experiences and maturing research. Within these themes, the work presented spans a wide range of application domains such as public health, aeronauticsand the automotive industry. It also involvesa variety of requirements engineering techniques, from the most established (such as use cases or feature models) to the most innovative (such as search-based software engineering or negotiation constellations). As in the previous years, the proceedings serve as a record of REFSQ 2008, butalsopresentanexcellentsnapshotofthestateoftheartofresearchandpr- tice. As such, we believe it is of interest to the whole requirements engineering community, from students embarking on their PhD to experienced practiti- ers, researchers and teachers interested in emerging knowledge, techniques and methods.